After reaching out to the darkroom, I agreed with the owner of the Darkroom Bar on doing in on April 11th – it’s during the holidays but then it’ll be less busy, meaning set up won’t be too much of a hassle, but would have to take place during the day because it closes at 6pm. The owner, James, stated that I would need to bring my own drum kit in to have a decent sound, and bring down a PA system since the one in the darkroom is quite old and he wouldn’t recommend I use that one.
Other than this, I am still not set on a band that will play on the performance day and Laiara’s original songs are still not completed at this point in time. I will therefore have to be sterner in chasing musicians, since I had problems with availability of original sax player and chasing up Laiara’s friend who plays the drums. The artist, Laiara is quite slow at getting these songs done properly, so I need to communicate with her that I would want her to finish demos of her song. I wanted this done outside of the studio, since it’s hard with technical issues, collecting the equipment, setting up and running from the control room to the live room every time there’s a problem. In our past studio sessions, nothing has really progressed, so it has been a waste of time still trying to figure out and finish the original songs.
I will therefore have to contact a lot of people: tech team to help me, musicians and making make sure they’re available, technicians about equipment and PA system that can be used/brought downstairs into the Darkroom Bar.
Since I am planning to hold my event during the holidays after informing the technicians about this, they reminded me that the kit room may be a little hard to book equipment for during the holidays, which I didn’t really think about. Because of this, I will need to go into kit room and ask about if I could book equipment for my event during this time.
I have been communicating with the technicians a lot, where they have been recommending me microphones that I can use for my event that are accessible to me. In an email sent to me, the technician Alba said: “The most suitable microphones available for student use include the SM58s, the DPA 4099 kit (up to 10 mics), the AKG 451b, and the AKG 414. The last two could be used as overheads if needed, though given the venue’s size, that may not be necessary.”
With all this in mind, I want to test the DPA4099s on the drums and hear if the microphones for overheads would be better or not. I also wish to ask technicians about the kick drum microphone – is there a specific microphone they would suggest for this for a live event accessible to me?